Goa Beaches

Walking along the beaches of Goa, India, one is harangued by young men (mostly; we did see at least one young woman), urging us to follow them to a beach chair with umbrella. We don’t know if they were employees of the cafes/bars that line the upper tiers of the beaches, or if they were freelancers, working off tips from drink and food orders. Probably the latter. The chairs were public, so they were apparently offering an ad hoc service. As we walked along the water’s edge (Arabian Sea), they would swoop down the sand, ardently urging us to take refuge in a beach chair in front of their respective café or bar, sometimes ardently, relentlessly, sometimes to the point of imagined homicide. And often they would be a mere 50 feet or so from each other, close enough to see and hear our refusal of the offer from their colleagues. They weren’t incessant beggars, but most often soft-sell, even charming hawkers, though they never tried to differentiate their particular venue from the next. We understood their situation in general (this was their meager living), and we even grew to find it amusing (“Congratulations! You’re the 100^th to offer us a beach chair on the last half mile of this beach!”), but it was hard to comprehend the incessant badgering. Yet as we walked back up the beach later, we noticed that there were fewer beach-chair-hawkers and more doughy tourists in the beach chairs (mostly over-aged and overweight Brits in bikinis and Speedos, requiring the adverting of eyes). So apparently the hard sell works.

Random India Observations

· One of the first things our driver on the short drive from the New Delhi airport to our hotel asks us is “Do you have children?” (a question we’d be asked several times by others). Another question: “How do you like me?”

· In the bedside drawer in our hotel in New Delhi are both a Gideon Bible and a Bhagavad-Gita.

· Almost all the men in India wear long-sleeve shirts, some with sweaters or coats. It’s 90° and I’m conspicuous wearing short sleeves. I get stares.

· There are apparently no words for “oxygen mask” or “life jacket” in Hindi.

· The northern Indian landscape is mostly barren, lacking almost any sign of human habitation or presence (towns, farms, roads, etc.). The 1.17 billion people are apparently crowded into the cities.

· The traffic in Mumbai is insane, a congested chaos of cars, taxis, trucks, motorcycles, autorickshaws, mostly stopped at traffic lights or traffic jams in general or attempting to funnel eight unmarked lanes into two unmarked lanes.

· One of the views across the street from the Four Seasons Hotel in Mumbai is slums.

· Slums are also visible from the $1.8 billion, 27-story “home” of the wealthiest person in India (and the fourth wealthiest in the world).

· The traffic snarls at intersections attract both peddlers and beggars, tapping on the car windows. We take the cue from our first driver who automatically locks the doors at the first beggar’s approach and ignore her and the infant on her hip.

· Everyone you talk with in India sound like they’re tech support.

· 18 million people live in Mumbai. We tell our driver we live in a city of 60 thousand. He finds this quite humorous.

· We bump into a massive (and massively expensive) wedding celebration at our hotel. But it turns out to be a pre-wedding (massively expensive) celebration. Apparently weddings are no minor events here.

· The caste system is very much in evidence throughout India. We never do get used to viewing our drivers as inferiors, servants, at our bidding, but it is clear – and we are told – that that is the case.

· Most every public area is populated by beautiful Indian woman in wonderfully colored saris (their beauty no doubt accentuated if not effected by the wonderfully colored saris).

· There’s an awkwardness visiting Buddhist sites or temples, wanting to experience, not wanting to offend – take off shoes? not take photos? avert eyes from those in prayer? One of my photos of a temple doesn’t come out.

· With a computer connection, we’re able to read US papers daily, listen to NPR. On the cable TV we’re able to watch CNN and BBC. I go to the gym in the morning and walk on the treadmill, watching CNN. I check my email and my online classes a couple of times a day. There is no electronic or digital isolation.

· Just about everyone we meet everywhere is helpful, pleasant, accommodating to the point of obsequiousness (colonial residue or ethnic character?).

· We have problems understanding our driver, and he has problems understanding us. But if he had any command of English, he would be something more than a driver (the better-paid staff at the hotels speak generally good English).

· You hear both Mumbai and Bombay. Though Mumbai is official, Bombay is still common.

· The price of a 12-oz. beer ranges from Rs 60 ($1.30) to Rs 340 ($8.00). All is location.

· Getting lost in Mumbai (though not too lost) is probably a good thing in terms of seeing the city as it is day-to-day.

· We see very few Americans, virtually none beyond the business hotel we stay in, a number of Brits, especially in Goa (apparently a sort of British Riviera).

· Cattle and water buffalo have right away on all roads. It adds somewhat to the danger of a traffic that ignores lanes. But it also slows things up, sometimes to a complete contemplative stop.

· In the city, honking horns are the sound that dominates. On the coast, in Goa, it’s the squawking of crows.

· I only once barter for something, a t-shirt in Goa. They ask Rs 250 ($5.50), but I hold firm at Rs 200 ($4.50). I probably could have gotten Rs 175 ($3.75). But why? They certainly need the money more than me.

Kanheri Caves Celebrities

We never imagined when we went to India that we would, however briefly, become celebrities there.

On our last day in Mumbai we visited the Kanheri Caves in the Sanjay Ghandi National Park, at 64 square miles, the largest park in the world within a city limits. The caves are not natural caves, but, like the Elephanta Island Caves (which we also visited early in our trip, an hour’s ferry ride off the coast from Mumbai), were chiseled out of the volcanic rock at the top of a mountain by Buddhist monks from the 1^st century BCE through the 7^th century AD. Most of the 109 caves (we didn’t begin to see them all) were “houses” for the monks, small chambers, most no larger than about ten-by-fifteen feet, some with side rooms about six-feet square. Others served as small shrines for meditation, and other larger and deeper caves with elaborate columns and statues were used for communal gathering and worship. The hike up the mountain, mostly on carved stone stairways, is arduous but interrupted regularly by various caves, dark and relatively cool inside. And outside an occasional breeze helps to stem the sweat. But it’s hard to imagine, and easy to admire, the effort, dedication, and, yes, faith that must have gone into this ancient monument. In its own modest way, it’s as grand as the Anasazi pueblos or Mayan temples or much later European cathedrals – awe inspiring, inspiring awe.

But that has nothing to do with our becoming celebrities.

After buying our tickets and entering the site, as we stopped to get our bearings and a sense of the place (monkeys dashing about, fighting, scrapping for bits of food), a group of fifty or so Indian students (“college,” our driver with limited English speaking ability told us, though they looked more like secondary students) passed us noisily with the enthusiasm of any school group out on a field trip. We didn’t think much of them, except for the elegant, brightly colored clothes – I almost want to say costumes – that they wore, indeed that we had seen worn just about everywhere we’d been in India.

They went on ahead of us, and we didn’t see or hear anything of them until a couple of hours later. We were at the base of the carved steps that went up to the top of the mountain, and they were just beginning their descent. We considered whether we should pass through the large group of teens on such a precarious path – perhaps they would barrel into us, sending us rolling down the rock to an accidental Buddhist sacrifice into the next life. But our driver assured us that it would be fine, and we began our climb, single file, our driver in the lead, followed by me, followed by Jac. We met the throng of students about halfway up the stairs. They parted for our driver to pass, but when they saw me and Jac, they excitedly pulled out their cameras and cellphones and began wildly taking pictures, fascinated by these strangers in their strange land. They asked us (by gesture, not language) to pose with them, the boys with me, the girls with Jac. We were clearly an unexpected bonus to their field trip.

I’m not sure what fascinated them so. I would think that they had seen plenty of Caucasians on a regular basis, as this was for some time a British colony, and there are still a lot of British tourists (though most seem to go to the beaches of Goa rather than the streets of Mumbai). But maybe these teens don’t see that many westerners, with our strange skin and hair and clothes. We’d noticed throughout our trip the interest taken in us by mostly younger children, sitting next to us, staring at us on a boat ride, curious as we waited for a light to change on the street. Perhaps they don’t come into contact with that many westerners. Most tourists and business people probably don’t intersect with the majority of Mumbai-ites, particularly not the children. So we were something surprising, unusual for these kids, not so much celebrities as curiosities, maybe even freaks.

Discomforting Mumbai

I’d seen poverty before. I’d seen it in New York, I’d seen it in Rome, I’d seen it in Chicago, I’d seen it in Belize, I’d seen it in Wichita and Denver and Atlanta and Santa Fe and Minneapolis and Memphis and San Francisco and just about every place I’d ever been. I’ve used the adjectives “destitute” and “abject” and “squalid” to modify the poverty I’ve seen. But there are no adjectives to adequately describe the poverty in Mumbai (Bombay). Indeed, “poverty” is hardly an adequate term. Drive along the Western Express Highway, and as you rise up onto a flyover you’ll look out over a checkerboard of crowded tin-roofed rusted shacks, inches separating them. Take an off-ramp and you’ll pass uncomfortably close to rows of tarp lean-tos against the gray concrete walls, the clog of traffic forcing you to see, dogs and cats and rag pickers foraging through the garbage. I couldn’t bring myself to photograph it – poverty porn – and I’m somewhat uncomfortable putting up here a couple of photos I got from the Internet. But I can’t describe the squalor that these people live in, and somehow survive in, without visual evidence:

But what is most discomforting about the poverty in Mumbai is the vast spectrum of wealth that the country’s caste system still exerts, from those in the poorest of slums to those in the most lavish of grandeur to the many scattered somewhere along the axis. On our first day in Mumbai, our driver (yes, we had a driver, putting us somewhere toward the lavish end of the spectrum, though nowhere near the grandeur end) pointed out the $1.8 billion, 27-story “home” of the wealthiest person in India (and the fourth wealthiest in the world). Our own accommodations, the ITC Maratha Hotel (which we weren’t paying for, and couldn’t pay for), forced the disparity uneasily home for us:

We wouldn’t have even been in Mumbai, of course, if we couldn’t have afforded it (helped immensely by company funding), and so wouldn’t have felt the embarrassment or sympathy, at least as much as we could manage to wring out of our shock (the guidebooks call it “cultural shock,” but the shock doesn’t really need modification). We very much enjoyed our time in Mumbai, the sightseeing, the food, the art, the history, even the elegant chaos of traffic congestion. But there is in the city always the undercurrent of inequality that lines and spreads out from the Western Express Highway, a dingy gray carpet of uneasy inhumanity.

62 at Goa, India

A nice way to welcome one’s 62^nd year is in the Resort Rio in the state of Goa, India:

Sunset at Resort Rio

Baga Beach

Lawrencio’s Café, Candolim Beach

Mumbai Traffic

Mumbai (Bombay), India, is a city of elegant chaos, 18 million people, most of whom seemingly at any one time in traffic – in cars, trucks, taxis, buses, motored rickshaws; on scooters, motorcycles, bikes, foot – all moving in all directions, slow and stop and start (quick, sudden), a constant weaving between lanes, marked or not, ignored, accompanied by the incessant beeping of horns, some warning of coming through, some signal of allowed merging, some anger at attempted forced entry, none with a clear indication of intention (at least to the frightened initiate who marvels in wonder at the uneasy ballet) – the whole a mechanistic mess that in an odd way probably best smacks of the human circulatory system, with the constant shove for corpuscular position, not so much competing for any individual advantage but rather cooperating in a muddle of mass motion forward, however hesitant.

Welcome to India

I’ve been in India (New Delhi right now) for only about eight hours but I’ve already formed a cultural/social question I’m going to have pursue: Are the Indian people inherently friendly and helpful (to the point of obsequiousness), or is it a product of entrenched class structure and British colonial rule? From the gentleman sitting next to me on the plane from Chicago (who is an American born in India), to our driver from the airport to the hotel, to the hotel staff (I just had a couple of cups of coffee and cookies in the middle of the night (24 hour restaurant), not being able to sleep, and when I asked for the bill was told that it was gratis because I was a guest of the hotel). This is just the first (night) of nine days, but if this keeps up I might just have found a new favorite country – and people.